I've had a couple of relationships, but none of the women, including my current girlfriend, compare to my mum for affection, attitude and sex appeal. Sometimes I just want to leave my girlfriend and ask Mum to move in and live with me so I can take care of her. To be honest I sometimes thought I was having sex with my mother while I was in bed with my girlfriend. Is it normal for a son to think of his mother sexually, as his lover? I don't think so. I am so confused. Am I in love with my mum? Or it is a fantasy? Should I tell mum about my feelings for her?

It is not uncommon for a person to confuse familial love with sexuality, and some young males do have sexual feelings about their mothers. After all, your first experience of human attachment, both emotional and physical, was with your mother. Read about Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex; it would suggest you have not had a strong father figure in your life to temper your teenaged, maternally focused lust. It sounds as though you've somehow been cast as your mother's "protecter". If there were just the two of you during your adolescence, perhaps you felt as though you were a kind of "partner" to her; and perhaps she unconsciously made you that. Now you're an adult with a girlfriend, you're having some deep feelings of guilt, as though you have wrongly replaced your mother. But you can never be your mother's actual lover, and you must find your own, more appropriate partner. You adore your mother, but you're not "in love" with her in the way that naturally frightens you. And that's for a very good reason; it is taboo.

• Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.